Enjoy the Gift of Childhood

Enjoy the Gift of Childhood

Chapter 1: Believe in More

Confidently—that is the way many enter the dawn of parenthood. New parents are secure with their plan of action, to either do what their parents did or do the exact opposite. Copying the examples, or revolting against them, will not provide the actuality that is rightfully deserved. The child will grow out of being young; but few adults will sow words the developing brain yearns for, while even fewer parents will reap the rewards promised for this time in life. Rising to face the challenge can cause new parents to wonder.

Where can parents find the time to enjoy childhood? Enjoying may be a stretch when many are just trying to make it through the day with their kids. A friend pointed out, during one of those challenging moments, that kids have the power to suck the very life right out of you. Admittedly, time spent with children can be exhausting.

This season of life hit me hard one morning at the grocery store. I stood in line, zoned out, working on autopilot to pile my food on the conveyor. By the time my walking-zombie self realized that we were surrounded—it was already too late. The carefully placed impulse buys, in a rainbow of colors, called out to all those at eye level. My poor planning left me telling my son “no candy” and my daughter “no touching.”

I looked around to see if another line was moving faster but a shopper was entering our lane, blocking our escape. Swinging her basket of groceries, she strode up to our public scene saying, “Oh, how I wish my children were all that size again.”

I straightened myself up to get a look at her. She was impeccably dressed. Her hair remained perfectly in place as she leisurely put her few items on the conveyor. I may have glared a little—because I was pretty sure I looked as frazzled as I felt. Thinking back on the morning frenzy, I did not remember running a brush through my hair.

There was no time to respond to her, but my face said,  you’ve got to be kidding?!

As I crossed the finish line at checkout and immediately launched into the next race, I felt envious of that lady’s leisure. After getting the kids buckled in, I dared a peek in my rearview mirror. Looking back at me was a more disheveled self than I had pictured. My reflection forced me to wonder, How could anyone look at me and want to do that all over again? Now think about it—I am not talking about some heart-warming scene here. A person saw chaos at a checkout counter, and she seemed to miss it.

The thought of her wanting to relive that time sounded crazy but begged the question: Are we all missing an important piece of the puzzle?

The time to listen, and learn, is when we can still use the wisdom. But with a plethora of parenting advice, whose wisdom should we consider? The author of Brain-Body Parenting said, “What’s crucial isn’t understanding someone else’s guidelines but understanding how our parenting is ‘landing’ in our child.”

Nowadays, the lack of time and enjoyment are everyday symptoms of our fast-paced lifestyle. Parenthood, like the pandemic, can spawn symptoms of situational anhedonia. The condition of anhedonia can flare up when your environment feels overwhelming, or underwhelming, teetering your idea of enjoyment on a slippery slope. Individuals will recognize enjoyment uniquely, while some may not have time to recognize it at all.

The elusive pleasure older parents spoke of along with their sincere advice seemed more than a bit off-kilter. Their words sounded unbelievable, but how could so many come to the same wrong conclusion?

Parents have not yet learned what grandparents have come to know. Missed opportunities can arise when we have not allowed in new information during the time it would serve us best. Notoriously, people do not make time to learn when it’s needed most. We are all mere mortals, and yet we have access to the most complex tool in the known universe—the human brain.

Complex tools can be intimidating, but don’t allow feelings of apprehension to grow. Reading the research in this book is not intended to turn you into a neuroscientist. Let yourself explore how your brain likes to learn because it will give you daily advantages.

Take a moment to think about it. It’s worth your time, considering the fact that you will live and work with the brain you build for the rest of your life. Your child is destined to do the same. Depending on your point of view, the brain you are building can be seen as a menacing curse or a potential gift.

You aren’t alone if you look at learning with a sense of imposition upon your free time. Past experiences may have shown you a correlation between the complexity of a subject and your required study time. The human brain has a tendency to prefer comfort over complications. We now know that your unconscious brain may try to avoid new information unless you consciously decide you want to allow a new idea in. It can seem as if your brain works against you, but it is a valuable part of your team.

Our fascination with the human brain can be traced throughout history, but now the brain is no longer inscrutable. Thanks to the development of new research techniques, pieces of the shroud have been lifted. Brain scans make it possible to see your brain as a manageable resource that you can tap into. Tapping it will open the door to teaching your child to harness their natural resources.

You have a chance to help your children grow up with a healthier relationship with their thoughts. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to consciously decide to be open to learning. Information about how your brain likes to learn was not available when you were growing up, so your preexisting ideas do not have the available facts. A quote from Mark Twain is still relevant for the skeptical brains of today.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” -Mark Twain

Now is the time to boldly enter updated information:

Our willingness to apply new information will help our children not hand down the same problems to the next generation.

The cycle of trying to recreate what your parents did, but now in a time of different rules and norms, ends with you.

It is no longer necessary to try and copy or revolt against the parental instruction you received during your first few years that you do not remember.

Believe in more chances to enjoy these child-rearing years. A fantastic resource for updating outdated information is Dr. Becky Kennedy, named the Parenting Whisperer. She shares her advice, “We can parent with a firm set of expectations and still be playful, we can create and enforce boundaries and still show our love, we can take care of ourselves and our children.” Parenthood is hard, but not as hard and uncertain as the world of a child. Even though life can be challenging, for all parties involved, enjoyment is possible.

Young kids naturally excel at enjoying. You are never too old to set your sights on enjoying every step of the learning process and continue to follow new ideas of interest. To enjoy the gift of childhood may sound like a dubious endeavor, but that is precisely what we are going to do as the next chapter demystifies how your brain likes to learn.

Chapter 2: Enter Boldly

Nothing in the known universe, no animal nor machine, can come close to learning as well as people. Let’s start calling the shots for this thing we all do so well. How you react to new information is unique to you and developed by your feelings about what is happening. To begin learning, you must convince yourself that the process is worth your time.

Once your brain believes that learning something new is worthwhile, it will release a balance of chemicals into your body, helping you focus on what’s gratifying, and giving you the energy needed to attain it. Research suggests that both your pleasure and memory can be affected by chemicals. “Novel experiences give you a rush of the reward chemical dopamine.” You cannot choose the chemicals released in your body but you can choose how you feel about the learning process.

Ready to demystify the learning process? Human brains start with a similar lump of matter. Basically, we all start out the same. Then, something singular happens! You interpret both your external experiences and your internal thoughts and create unique neural pathways. Creating new neural pathways and altering existing ones is where learning and adaptations occur. These dynamic neural pathways are continuously sending signals from one part of your brain to another. The neural pathways you select most become dominant and are what make you, you.

Dominant, and often used neural pathways will become your unconscious response to life. Children have more opportunities to create new neural pathway patterns because there is so much of life that is new to them.

As children grow, development is only one source of variation. How each person “feels” about their internal and external stimuli makes for an infinite number of variations.

Each neural pathway pattern is unique, with associations coming from your version of your experiences and thoughts. Neural pathways are extremely powerful in determining your behavior. If you avoid change or learning, it’s probably because at some point you created a neural pathway that triggers a negative response when you receive new information. Let’s explore how your choice of responses about learning are the building blocks for who you become as an individual.

You create a neural pathway for every new thought, and your brain does this by making a connection between neurons. “Your brain associates each thought with a pattern—a series of neurons connected by a specific neural pathway. And, what’s truly amazing is that no two people’s pathways for the same thought or experience look the same.” The pattern of connections will be different from anyone else who is looking at the same image, smelling the same scent, or hearing the same music.

Once the brain thinks it knows something it will follow the neural pathway previously entrenched by repetition and/or emotional association. For now, you only need to know that an adult brain has a tendency toward laziness and will unconsciously process over the same path of least resistance. Instead of forging a new neural pathway, your unconscious brain when left unchecked may dismiss new information that does not fit in an existing pathway pattern.

Ready to kick-start the learning process? You initiate a rippling effect when you choose to learn something new and create new neural pathways. When you choose to feel open about learning you pave the way for your entire body to experience more. The powerful you is not found in your brain alone, it is the thinking and feeling part of you that can be found in every cell within your body.

Apart from the eighty-six billion neurons in your brain, there are billions of other neurons throughout your body. Be open to imagining your system working like a tree, cooperatively from its roots to its canopy. The roots of a tree transport water and nutrients from the environment and the leaves use photosynthesis to send glucose through the tree. In a similar way, you transport information through signals to and from your brain, using neural pathways to activate the memory or new thought that permeates your entire body. Your entrenched pathways are the thick branches through which much can flow, while learning looks like a tiny bud of a branch.

Tiny buds can be easily pruned from your tree and this process of pruning happens in the brain when neural pathways are not strengthened by repetition or emotional stimuli. Pruning is one way that experience plays a crucial role because if the neural pathway is not used it will be eliminated. Sending and receiving through a mix of electric and chemical transmissions begins before birth and builds upon itself throughout life. Distinctive synaptic connections are recorded along neural pathways in your brain, based on how you feel and have felt about things your entire life.

When learning, all ages of human beings create new synaptic connections allowing for the adaptation of neurons during the learning process, but the young are creating and allowing more. Early childhood learning studies show, “There are over a million synaptic connections forming, per second, in the developing brain of a baby.” Over a million is a large number to digest so take a moment to calm your skeptical self. You are just becoming aware of the volume of connections forming and recognizing that this is how you started.

Just a few decades ago, science could only guess what was happening in a developing brain. Today science can prove that “More connections are formed in the brain prenatally and in the first few years of life than at any other time.” Witnessing the amount of activity on that first brain scan of a child must have been a surprise to neuroscientists, but now the realization that every human started this same way simplifies the learning process.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change its structure and function. A developing brain does this in response to adjustments needed to learn. Malleable neurons can adjust with learning or change if required.

As you age, you maintain the ability to learn; with a caveat, now learning requires the conscious effort of believing the new information is worth your time. You make a choice to either allow in new information (build a neural pathway) or deny the new ideas access (use an entrenched neural pathway). When something is new, your brain may want to purge the information in order to not build new connections.

Did you stop enjoying the learning process? Humans spend their entire life learning or avoiding, so don’t let an outdated neural pathway complicate your entire life. If you entrenched a neural pathway in the past that triggers a negative response to learning, you have options.

You may still experience responses along your entrenched pathways, but now you are aware. Awareness gives you the option to decide if that automatic response is still valid.

Update your reaction by creating a new neural pathway in your brain that associates learning with enjoyment.

Learning is best when it’s enjoyed. Are you ready to start enjoying yourself? Once you believe the new idea is worth your investment of time, then the thought has your permission to proceed. Understanding how your system operates sets you free to continue exploring.

The important piece of brain processing for you to remember is that the most dominant and frequently used neural pathways are unconscious responses. Your brain strives to maintain a comfort zone within pathways of least resistance. The concept of the path of least resistance can be applied to many areas of your life because your brain can be lazy about forging new neural pathways.

Automatic responses may feel natural and go unnoticed but the same regurgitated information is a numbing consolation. Neuroimaging can show that automatic responses along entrenched neural pathways do not let your brain expand. As you read, reconsider how much you allow your brain to function on autopilot.

Knowing how your brain processes new information is a big step toward managing enjoyment levels. Learning a new concept at any age leads to actual changes in your brain, by adjusting the balance of available neurotransmitters and the pattern of neural pathways. Take a lifetime of learning what a fantastically complicated body you reside in.

Now that you know how your brain likes to learn, you have a powerful management tool to tweak your brain, but the young will need a separate tool. The developing brain starts out enjoying the creation of new neural pathways. The young believe they can learn to do anything. Children naturally excel at learning, before the critical part of their brain is active.

We can draw inspiration from their sense of possibility. If you have a toddler, maybe you have heard the question “Why?” dozens of times in a day. (Maybe you never want to hear it again!) Yet, asking the same question yourself can help you connect better with your child while making it easier to learn what’s in this book.

See if you can keep a sense of curiosity every time you notice a skeptical reaction coming up. Instead of trying to change a child or focus on fixing a child, let’s assume the child is not broken. Give yourself permission to refocus on yourself and what you can learn to help your child. It is not that children’s brains are less powerful than ours, it is that the young brain has different accessible regions so children process differently.

They are born absorbent and soak in their environment, but babies and young children must train their brains to be responsive to external stimuli. If wisdom is gained through experience, you can consider yourself wiser than a young child. Wiser because of experience is one of the few benefits of an adult brain versus a developing brain. Over the past twenty years, science has been able to learn the disparate powers of a young brain.

Neuroscientific discoveries allow us to learn how our adult brains work differently from those of a young developing brain. Children’s inaccessible brain regions may grant the child superiority over an adult’s static access. It’s time for the next chapter, revealing the pros and cons of a “Life on Autopilot.”